The Utopian Body Foucault

8/9/2019 The Utopian Body Foucault

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Michel Foucault - The utopian body

This place that Proust slowly, anxiously comes to copy anew every time he awaken:

from that place, as soon as my eyes are open, I can no longer escape. Not that I amnailed down by it, since after all I can not only move, shift, but I can also move it, shift it,change its place. The only thing is this: I cannot move without it. I cannot leave it therewhere it is, so that I, myself, may go elsewhere. I can go to the other end of the world; Ican hide in the morning under the covers, make myself as small as possible. I can evenlet myself melt under the sun at the beach - it will always be there. Where I am. It is here,irreparably: it is never elsewhere. My body, it's the opposite of a utopia: that which isnever under different skies. It is the absolute place, the little fragment of space where I

am, literally, embodied. My body, pitiless place.

And what if by chance I lived with it, in a kind of worn familiarity, as with a shadow, or aswith those everyday things that ultimately I no logger see, that life has grayed out, likethose chimneys, those roofs that line the sky every night in front of my window? Still,every morning: same presence, same wounds. In front of my eyes the same unavoidableimages are drawn, imposed by the mirror: thin face, slouching shoulders, myopic gaze,no more hair - not handsome at all. And it is in this ugly shell of my head, in this cage I donot like, that I will have to reveal myself and walk around; through this grill I must speaklook and be looked at; under this shin I will have to rot.

My body: it is the place without recourse to which I am condemned. And actually I thinkthat it is against this body (as if to erase it) that all these utopias have come into being.The prestige of utopia - to what does utopia owe its beauty, its marvel? Utopia is a placeoutside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body that willbe beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in itsduration. Untethered, invisible, protected - always transfigured. It may very well be that

the first utopia, the one most deeply rooted in the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia ofan incorporeal body.

The land of fairies, land of gnomes, of genies, magicians - well it is the land wherebodies transport themselves at the speed of light; it is the land where wounds are healedwith marvelous beauty in the blink of an eye. It is the land where you can fall from amountain and pick yourself up unscathed. It is the land where you're visible when youwant, invisible when you desire. If there is a land of fairy tales, it is precisely so that I maybe its prince charming, and that all the pretty boys there may turn nasty and hairy as

bears.

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themselves inside it. They enter - and I am certain that things enter my head when I look,because the sun, when it is too strong and blinds me, rips through to the back of mybrain. And yet, these things that enter my head remain on outside, since I see them infront of me, and in order to reach them I must come forward in turn.

Incomprehensible body, penetrable and opaque body, open and closed body, utopianbody. Absolutely visible body, in one sense. I know very well what it is to be looked overby someone else from head to toe. I know what it is to be spied from behind, watchedover the shoulder, caught off guard when I least expect it. I know what it is to be naked.And yet this same body, which is so visible is also withdrawn, captured by a kind ofinvisibility from which I can never really detach it. This skull, the back of my skull, I canfeel it, right there, with my fingers. But see it? Never. This back, which I can feel leaningagainst the pressure of the mattress, against the couch when I am lying down, and which

I might catch but only by the ruse of the mirror. And what is the shoulder, whosemovements and positions I know with precision, but that I will never be able to seewithout dreadfully contorting myself? The body - phantom that only appears in the mirageof the mirror, and then only in fragmentary fashion - do I really need genies and fairies,and death and the soul, in order to be, at the same time, both visible and invisible?Besides, this body is light; it is transparent; it is imponderable. Nothing is less thing thanmy body: it runs it acts, it lives, it desires. It lets itself be traversed, with no resistance, byall my intentions. Sure. But until the day when I hurt, when a pit is hollowed out in my

belly, when my chest and throat choke up, block up, fill up with coughs. Until the day thata toothache crazes in the back of my mouth. And then, I cease to be light, imponderable,et cetera. I become thing fantastic and ruminated architecture.

No really, there is no need for magic, for enchantment. There's no need for a soul, nor adeath, for me to be both transparent and opaque, visible and invisible, life and thing. Forme to be a utopia, it is enough that I be a body. All those utopias by which I evaded mybody - well they had, quite simply, their model and their first application, they had theirplace of origin, in my body itself. I really was wrong, before, to say that utopias are turned

against the body and destined to erase it. They were born from the body itself, andperhaps afterwards they turned against it.

In any case, one thing is certain: that the human body is the principal actor in allutopias. After all, isn't one of the oldest utopias about which men have told themselvesstories the dream of an immense and inordinate body that could devour space andmaster the world? This is the old utopia of giants that one finds at the heart of so manylegends in Europe, in Africa, in Oceania, in Asia - this old legend that for so long fed theWestern imagination, from Prometheus to Gulliver.

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The body is also a great utopian actor when it comes to masks, makeup, and tattoos.To wear a mask, to put on makeup, to tattoo oneself, is not exactly (as one mightimagine) to acquire another body, only a bit more beautiful, better decorated, more easilyrecognizable. To tattoo oneself, to put on makeup or mask, is probably something else:It is to place the body in communication with secret powers and invisible forces. Themask, the tattooed sign, the face-paint - they lay upon the body an entire language, anentirely enigmatic language, an entire language that is ciphered, secret, sacred, whichcalls upon this body the violence of the God, the silent power of the Sacred, or theliveliness of Desire. The mask, the tattoo, the make-up: They place the body into ananother space. They usher it into a place that does not take place in the world directly.They make of this body a fragment of imaginary space, which will communicate with theuniverse of divinities, or with the universe of the other, where one will be taken by thegods, or taken by the person one has just seduced. In any case the mask, the tattoo, the

make-up, are operations by which the body is torn away from its proper space andprojected into an other space. Listen, for example, to this old Japanese tale, and to theway a tattoo artist makes the body of the young woman he desires pass into a universethat is not ours:

The morning sun glittered on the river, setting the eight-mat studio ablaze with light. Rays reflected from the water sketched rippling golden waves on the paper sliding screens and on the face of the girl, who was fast asleep. Seikichi had closed the doors and taken up his tattooing instruments, but for a while he only sat there entranced, savoring to the full her uncanny beauty. He thought that he would never tire of contemplating her serene mask-like face. Just as the ancient Egyptians had embellished their magni ficent land with pyramids and sphinxes, he was about to embellish the pure skin of this girl. Presently he raised the brush which was gripped between the thumb and last two fingers of his left hand, applied its top to the girl's back, and, with the needle which he held in his right hand, began pricking out a design. (1)

And if one considers that clothing, sacred or profane, religious or civil, allows theindividual to enter into the enclosed space of the monk, or into the invisible network ofsociety, then one sees that everything that touches the body - drawing, colors,diadems,tiaras, clothes, uniforms, all that - lets the utopias sealed in the body blossominto sensible and colorful form. And perhaps, then, one should descend beneath theclothes - one should perhaps reach the flesh itself, and then one would see that in somecases even the body itself turns its own utopian power against itself, allowing all the

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space of the religious and the sacred, all the space of the other world, all the space of thecounter world, to enter into the space that is reserved for it. So the body, then, in itsmateriality, in its flesh, would be like the product of its own phantasm. After all, isn't thebody of the dancer precisely a body dilated along an entire space that is both exteriorand interior to it? And the drugged, also? And the possessed? The possessed, whosebodies become hell; the stigmatized, whose bodies become suffering, redemption andsalvation: a bloody paradise. Really, it was silly of me, before, to believe that the bodywas never elsewhere, that it was an irremediable here, and that it opposed itself to anyutopia.

My body, in fact, is always elsewhere. It is tied to all the elsewhere of the world. And totell the truth, it is elsewhere than in the world; because it is around it that things arearranged. It is in relation to it - and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign - that

there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far.The body is the zero point in the world. There, where paths and spaces come to meet,the body is nowhere. It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which Idream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their space, and I negate themalso by the indefinite power of the utopias I imagine. My body is like the City of the Sun. Ithas no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real and utopian, emerge andradiate.

After all, children take a long time to know that they have a body. For months, for morethan a year, they only have a dispersed body of limbs, cavities, orifices. And all of thisonly gets organized, all of this gets literally embodied only in the image of the mirror.

Stranger still is the way Homer's Greeks had no word to designate the unity of the body.As paradoxical as it may be, on the walls defended by Hector and his companions, facingTroy, there was no body. There were raised arms, there were brave chests, there werenimble legs, there were helmets shimmering atop heads - there was no body. The Greekword for "body" only appears in Homer to designate a corpse. It is this corpse,

consequently, it is the corpse and it is the mirror that teach us - or at least that taught theGreeks then, and that teach the children now - that we have a body, that this body has aform, that this form has an outline, that in this outline there is a thickness, a weight. Inshort, that the body occupies a place. It is the mirror and it is the corpse that assign aspace to the profoundly and originally utopian experience of the body. It is the mirror andit is the corpse that silence, and appease, and shut into a closure (for us now sealed) thisgreat utopian rage that dilapidates and volatilizes our bodies at every instant. It is thanksto them, thanks to the mirror and to the corpse, that our body is not pure and simpleutopia. And yet, if one considers that the image of the mirror resides for us in an

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The Utopian Body Foucault